


winter kept us warm

by Anonymous



Category: TWICE (Band)
Genre: (very) loosely based on Yuri on Ice, Alternate Universe - Skating, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, ice skating that is, misana with an unfortunate start, more like rivals tbh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:53:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24213220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The first time Mina sees Minatozaki Sana, the other skater is, by all accounts, nothing special.That changes over time, in more ways than one.
Relationships: Minatozaki Sana/Myoui Mina
Comments: 10
Kudos: 71
Collections: Anonymous





	winter kept us warm

_[Nagano, All-Japan Figure Skating Championships; December 2010:]  
  
_

Myoui Mina wins her very first championship in a stadium full of people holding their breath, watching this tiny little girl in child-sized skates land jump after jump. Triple lutz. Triple flip, double loop, double loop; triple toe, triple salchow, all the way up to the end.

Second place never stood a chance.

The commentators will be the first to dare it later, to use the enigmatic and weighty word _prodigy_ , because who else can do what Mina has done? There’d been some expectation for her to perform well, here at her first appearance in the senior Japan Figure Skating Championships— after all, she’s won competitions before. But nothing like this. _This_ — this is something truly special.

Mina is thirteen years old. Her cheeks are round still, and her eyes wide with amazement and the thrill of being on the ice. She’ll never get used to winning, not quite, but the magic of it will fade a little faster than she expects.

In a few minutes they’ll announce her score, and it will give her the lead by exactly 2.37 points. Right now, though, the momentum of her last spin keeps her drifting in a slow spiral across the rink, and she lets the ice take her where it wants.

Mina breathes in, raises her arms and closes her eyes, and the crowd answers with her name.

————

_[Tennoji-ku, Osaka, Japan; January 2004:]  
  
_

Minatozaki Sana wins for the very first time in the midst of winter, slipping her way across the frozen lake in tattered, cheap skates to collapse in a fit of giggles on the shore. In the center, a man stands still as stone, a statue of surprise with snow dripping off his cheek, only to freeze again at the touch of the ice.

It’s her first victory and the first one that matters. Two Decembers ago her father had finally deemed her old enough to try, and clumsy, inelegant Sana spent most of the two weeks from Christmas to New Year’s out on the child-sized lake half an hour’s walk from her home— hardly larger than a pond, really— and spent most of her time on that lake falling.

The first time her father brought her out onto the ice, she’d clung tight to his elbow the entire hour they’d stayed there, yelping every other step even after he’d assured her that he wouldn’t let her fall. By the second day, she’d pushed away his offered arm with chubby fingers and toddled her way into the center, where the ice was thinnest and the water only four inches below, and she fell again and again and when they got home her mother scolded both of them for the damp patch that had formed on the seat of her pants. Then she drew up a hot-water bath for Sana anyway.

She was five then, seven now.

The gray in her father’s hair hasn’t yet started to show, but it’s there in the roots. It’ll take her a few more years to see it. They’ve grown since the first days on the ice, from skating to snowball fights, and she rarely falls anymore. But she’s never landed a hit until now.

Her father brushes the rest of the snow from his cheek with a smile. Sana digs her mittened hand into cold white crystals, closes her fist around another handful, and stands.

————

_[Kadoma, All-Japan Championships; December 2011:]  
  
_

One year after her first win and seven years after Minatozaki Sana’s, Mina’s just finished the short program and is waiting for her score in the kiss and cry— neither of which she’s actually done here. Crying can wait for somewhere free of the heavy gaze of cameras and competitors, but Mina has not yet finished off the podium and so has never quite had to hold back tears, though anything other than first is always disappointing.

Her feet ache. The doctor said growth spurts. She’ll have to get new skates soon.

That short program might have been the best she’s done this season, but Mina isn’t sure that it’s enough to put her in first. Last year was an anomaly of sorts; Mina is still, after all, only fourteen years old, and the national championships are meant for much more experienced skaters.

Her coach hands over her jacket, and she shrugs it on, doesn’t slip her arms through the sleeves. There’s a tiny knot of anticipation forming in the pit of her stomach that refuses to leave, even as she picks at the sequins on her dress in the hopes it’ll unravel.

Mina doesn’t look up until the announcer calls her name. Then she glances out at the rink despite knowing the score will come over the speakers, and at the exact moment that she does, the next girl steps onto the ice.

The first time she sees Minatozaki Sana, the other skater is, by all accounts, nothing special. In fact, Mina’s gaze slides right past her to search for her parents in the stands, and when she doesn't find them it falls back down to her own nails, the edges of which are ragged.

“Good job,” says her coach suddenly, and Mina starts.

She looks up at him. Her coach is a tall man: not smiling, not exactly, but the lines of his face are a little less stern than usual. On-screen, her score. She’d missed it, somehow, between her disinterest towards the girl on the ice and the vague intrigue of her own hands.

It’s not just the best she’s done this season. It’s the best anyone’s done at this competition so far.

“ _Myoui Mina,_ ” comes the overhead, “ _currently ranked first.”_

Mina’s coach puts a hand on her shoulder and smiles, just slightly. When she locates her parents in the crowd at last, their heads are turned towards the numbers on the screen.

Mina looks away from her coach, away from her parents, away from the screen; there is only one place that remains now, and her eyes find the girl on the ice as the applause dies and the announcer says, “ _Please welcome the next skater, Minatozaki Sana._

At the end of the day, Mina wins for the second time. Minatozaki Sana is not on the step below her, or the step below that, or on the podium at all after a slight tumble in the free skate. Minatozaki Sana places sixth, and her name doesn’t cross Mina’s mind again.

————

_[Minsk, Belarus, World Junior Championships; March 2012:]  
  
_

After the medal ceremony, Sana runs into Myoui Mina in the bathroom.

In the earliest days, Sana’s only glimpses of Myoui Mina had been through a television screen. Figure skating is popular in Japan, and the media had eaten up her story with relish, plastering photos of her mid-leap on nearly every news site. By the time Sana started to place in novice competitions, Mina was perhaps the most famous thirteen-year-old in the country.

Here, though, Mina is terribly close, bent over the sink with her knuckles pale against the porcelain rim. The medal she wears clinks gently against the tap; under the fluorescent lights, both gleam muted silver, and her eyes are closed.

Sana wonders, briefly, if Mina’s reliving her own routine the same way Sana does whenever she’s tripped on a landing she shouldn’t, the same way Sana’s coach has been trying to get her not to do lately. But that’s presumptuous of her. Second-best in the world is hardly disappointing, even if Mina’s performance today wasn’t as exceedingly flawless as the nation’s come to expect. Still...

“Myoui- _san_?” Sana says, cautiously.

The other skater’s eyes snap open, meet hers in the mirror above the sink— Sana is reminded, suddenly, that for all, Myoui Mina is three months younger than her. Something she’d managed to forget through the haze of all the gold medals and sponsorships and posters on Sana’s wall; something that she remembers now, seeing the way Mina’s expression wavers just slightly before settling like snow.

“Minatozaki- _san_!” Mina flushes and turns on the tap hastily, shoving her hands under the cold water without so much as a flinch. After the ice everything feels warm, Sana knows.

Like Sana, Mina hasn’t changed out of her costume, an ombre that darkens from white to deep violet, lined by five-petal flowers. It leaves part of her lower back exposed, and Sana can’t help but glance at the bandages plastered there, stretching across her pale skin like scars.

Unlike Sana, she doesn’t have a jacket. Sana doesn’t miss how Mina’s gaze drops down to the gold medal around her neck when she turns around, wringing the water from her hands, and she wishes she had thought to zip up the jacket before coming in.

“Congratulations,” Mina says after a beat of silence. “You skated well.”

“Thanks,” Sana says, feeling her face grow warm, embarrassingly, at the compliment. She shouldn’t be so flustered, really. For all of her fame, Mina is just a girl like her. “So did you.”

Mina shakes her head and lets out a tiny, stilted laugh. “Not as well as you.”

“No, really,” Sana insists. “Your triple lutz was so clean, I’ve been trying to get the right form for months.”

“Thank you,” says Mina, quietly. “But I’ve been practicing it for years.”

The silence between them stretches on until Sana’s shifting from foot to foot, uneasily. She wants to comfort Mina, like she would one of her friends from school, probably over something as simple as a failed exam. But the other girl might only withdraw from her touch, turn away from her reassuring words. She doesn’t know Mina well enough, if at all, to help with something like this.

“I had the gold,” Mina says suddenly, just as Sana’s about to give in and retreat to the safety of any of the open stalls. “It was _mine_. I was almost there, and then...”

And then she’d faltered.

The commentators had gone into a frenzy, speculating about what could have caused Mina’s surprising carelessness. Whether it was due to injury or a lapse in concentration, the series of mistakes that she’d made at the end of her free skate were all relatively small deductions, but they’d added up and tarnished the effortless grace that her routines were known for. The routines that Sana had watched for months before her own name had begun to climb the leaderboards. That she’d watched again today, rapt with attention, cheering along with the crowd.

Sana starts to stammer something, “I— You were—”

“I was going to win,” Mina says. The frustration is rising in her voice, even though she’s still speaking in the same soft tone. “But instead it was _you_. I didn’t even know who you were.”

The thing about idolizing people, Sana realizes, is that they rarely ever live up to expectations. Not in the sense of what Mina clearly considers to be her failure today, but rather... Sana could care less about the color of the medal hanging limp around the other girl’s neck. The coldness in Myoui Mina’s eyes when she looks up from Sana’s gold and at her is a different matter entirely.

“I’ll see you in Sochi,” Mina says.

On her way out, the fringe of her pretty purple dress brushes past Sana’s skin. Mina doesn’t spare her a second glance, and Sana swallows down the irrational disappointment that bubbles up, the urge to call out after her, holding her breath until the door has swung shut.

Sana’s left in the bathroom with the echo of Mina’s parting words. Out of all their implications, Sana can’t help but focus on one thing— that Mina seems to think that both of them will make it to Sochi, where the Grand Prix finals will be taking place in December. Or rather, that Sana— who is both more ambitious with her jumps and notoriously more inconsistent— will. Mina, Sana can tell, knows her qualification is guaranteed.

Does it mean anything, what Myoui Mina thinks? Sana can’t pretend it doesn’t. She’s just a girl, but— all those years ago, they called her a prodigy. The next great skater of Japan, now.

And before today she hadn’t even known who Sana was.

 _Well_ , Sana thinks, _hasn’t that changed._ Thinks of Mina on the pedestal below, of the way Mina had looked at Sana’s gold medal and the way her own silver had caught the glare of the light bulbs and shone. Maybe Sana hadn’t known who she really was either, before today.

_I’ll see you in Sochi, Myoui Mina._

  
————  
  


_[Sochi, Russia, Junior Grand Prix Final; December 2012:]_   
  


Mina watches Minatozaki Sana the entire time the other girl is on the ice.

Sana’s rise to the top, she reflects, has been nothing short of meteoric. 

“Sloppy,” her coach says. “This competition is yours, Mina.”

Mina can’t find it in herself to disagree, not as Sana lands another jump too early, lowering her base value to that of a double instead of a triple, not as Sana under-rotates slightly and the tip of her blade catches the ice instead of the edge. This performance, by all means, is a train wreck.

But she can’t find it in herself to look away, either.

Some people say that it’s an involuntary reaction for people to be drawn to tragedy, to be incapable of tearing their gazes from disaster. To slow their cars and peer out the window at the crash on the side of the road from the safety of the driver’s seat. But Mina thinks this is more than that.

There is something so completely enthralling about the way that Minatozaki Sana skates, even when it is as rushed and unrefined and _reckless_ as she is right now. Sana is not graceful in the way that Mina has been told she is, not often and certainly not today, but Mina will admit: Sana is a wonder to watch. She takes the risks Mina hasn’t dared to yet, and for now they don’t pay off more often than they do, but with a few more years of training... they’ll start to.

Mina wonders. When they do, will Mina—

Will Mina still win?

She’s so pathetic.

Minatozaki Sana has only beaten her once. Mina has nothing to worry about.

Not when Sana staggers off the ice and leans on the side of the rink to slip on her skate guards, not when Sana sits in the kiss and cry and her short program score comes out at a comfortable margin below Mina’s. Yes, Mina has no reason to worry.

After the free skate is finished, Mina stays in first. Sana doesn’t make the podium.

Mina stands at the top and when her eyes accidentally meet Sana’s in the crowd, she _doesn’t_ flinch. She digs her fingers into the gold medal until the rounded edge of it cuts back into her skin and tries not to think about how in a bathroom nine months ago, she’d looked at Minatozaki Sana with the same hostile expression Sana must be wearing now.

When she lets go there’s a red line across the length of her palm and she thinks about it anyway. She’s thought about it quite a few times over these past few months, that ugly part of herself that only seems to be held back by a gold medal, that she can’t show to the cameras lining the rink. Not as Myoui Mina, Japan’s darling golden girl, humble and shy.

In the solitude of a tiny bathroom, it was never meant to be seen. But then Sana had stumbled in, the medal around her neck so bright, the concern in her eyes when she'd called Mina’s name even more striking, and Mina had— Mina had—

The medal sears where it touches her chest. Back when Mina had still attended school, one of her teachers had told the class: _the solar plexus is a spot of particular vulnerability on the human body_.

She steps off the podium.  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah this is absolutely insane and i have no idea what i'm doing


End file.
